Friday, October 21, 2011

It is one of my absolute favorite times of year. I love the (stipulation: rare) stunningly clear and distinctly scented autumn days, I love the sweaters, I love the flavors of fall – the pumpkin, the sage, the maple syrup, the late blackberries. I love the way, even in the miserable, soggy, grim expanse of the pacific northwest, that subtle blush of color spreads over the leaves until all the trees blaze out in a defiance of crimson.
And I love the fall fashions. I get excited every year to see what new trends emerge. This year, there doesn’t seem to be much novelty in vogue, which has been really, really disappointing. Much like last year, we are still seeing a preponderant focus on ADD, ADHD, Asperger's, and bitching about the flu shot.
Oh heavens, I’m sorry. Did you think I was about to talk about clothing? If you want my sartorial critiques you are just going to have to wait until spring, when I’m good and donked up on vino verde and someone gives the Olsen twins another slab of stock in Walmart. Until then, I’m going to stick to sarcasm directed towards issues more directly in my wheelhouse, though admittedly those issues are pretty much confined to “bottles of wine that cost less than 10$.” But it’s my favorite season, google keeps sending maniacs to this blog, some people just had shoulder surgery, and anyway I’m hoping to post a little more frequently this term, as It has become far more imperative that I avoid any actual work. There’s also the small matter of needing to step up my game after I accidently promised to marry everyone I meet on the internet. I’m inspired!
So God damn, could we just move on to something innovative in our disease crazes? For years, we have been over-diagnosing and carping about the same old shit. Remember when suddenly everyone had depression? And now everyone has ADD? For god’s sake, everyone had Attention Deficit Disorder when I was a kid, and it’s been completely played out for years. For awhile, I really thought that the grand obsession with the Autism spectrum was going to help guide our focus in a new and truly avant-garde direction. But, no. Alas. I don’t exactly know who decides these things, but please just get a grip. It is way past time to move on. These guys are sticking like denim when they should have been jeggings. Let’s be real.
Every year holds the promise of a new arena of pathology, and every year I’m held back by a redundant deluge of the several million examples of why we should probably declare Jenny McCarthy’s asinine twitter feed a public health emergency. This year, I was so sure that things were going to be different. Firstly, we sequenced the BLACK PLAGUE. THE BLACK FUCKING PLAGUE, Y’ALL. And then we found out that the black plague AINT SHIT! How Badass is that?! Like, if the black plague were to come back, our immune systems wouldn’t even give a fuck! Our immune systems would give the black plague the kind of scornful once over that gets directed towards a fat girl who wore the same dress as you to a party. “Oh,” our immune systems would say. “I didn’t know you were coming.” As an aside, our immune systems would turn to our nervous system and whisper something about how they just let anyone in, these days. Daaaaaaaamn.
Secondly, popular culture has given a big boost to those of us in the health services by making epidemiology really, really sexy.
Remember how lame Dustin Hoffman was in Outbreak? 2011 won’t stand for that! The bathrooms in movie theaters after Contagion lets out are filled with people washing their hands more thoroughly and self consciously than ever before.
I realize that it’s really difficult to establish a cultural trend of conditions that are at baseline binary – I mean, you either have tuberculosis or you don’t. But there are so, so, so many disorders that fall somewhere on a diagnostic spectrum; couldn’t we just give one or two of those a chance to get crammed all the hell the way down the throats of people until we’re so goddamn sick of them we could just die? Like Trichotillomania, or Histrionic personality disorder, or Anemia? Obsessive Compulsive Disorder looked to be making a comeback, but much like overalls, that movement fizzled out in a hiss of Jack Nicholson. I think we’re doing a massive disservice to a huge component of the population by failing to acknowledge that pestilence, plague, and the vast and colorful spectrum of viral and bacterial infections are relevant and often integral parts of many lives. Maybe we could start a movement encouraging increased sensitivity? Who exactly decided that whole populations are suffering from a disadvantage as opposed to an alternative lifestyle? I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I don’t always remember to refer to some individuals as “differently-eased.”
I know that some of you will be skeptical. “What’s next?” You’ll ask. I’ll probably ignore you. Considering that the slippery slope argument inevitably ends in the mass extinction of a vulnerable population or sex with dogs, I try to use it sparingly if at all. I can only take so much.
On that note, Let’s talk about pathology as a pastime. The Mütter museum in Philadelphia is a warped wonderland of deformity and bizarre affliction.
A monument to morbidity, the museum is in fact beautiful, gleaming mahogany and burnished wood cases housing row upon row of grinning, alarmingly imperfect skulls behind spotless glass.
In a concession to modern sensibilities, there is a half assed exhibit at the very beginning of the museum dedicated to medical forensics, civil war wounds, and forensic anthropology.

one of these was a lady.

It doesn’t take long to get to the good stuff, though; Some broad that turned into soap and an entire case of surprising things that grew out of various sites generally considered unpopular or insalubrious for things to grow!

like a forehead.

The museum itself is a part of the Philadelphia College of Physicians, which, founded in 1787 boasts the oldest doctors in America. (Some details fuzzy.) The museum metastasized from a collection of curiosities donated by Dr. Thomas Mütter in 1858, and quickly became a repository for all the screwed up things people secretly want to look at but need some thinly veiled educational veneer as an excuse.

the sign reads: “I have been digging this shit out of urethras for 35 FUCKING YEARS and putting it in jars. You can judge but please remember you paid to look at this.”

That sign says, “I kept this monster hand in a jar so that next century, all you little bitches who can buy hand sanitizer in the express line at Old Navy and know how to defecate remotely can wrap your sterile little minds around what Gangrene looked like.”

One of my favorite exhibits was this exquisitely articulated skeleton. The bones are twisted and feathery, the joints eroded by strain and friction. As a piece of art, it’s breathtaking. As a monument to the freakish potential for human suffering, it’s heartbreaking.
This exhibit below was way more fun, because it is the direct result of the fascinating and limitless extent of human imbecility.
There are 32 drawers in this cabinet, and each one of them is filled completely with the staggering array of fatuous things that people have somehow choked to death on. All the usual suspects, like buttons, small bones, marbles, sanctimony and excessive cologne are all represented, but some of this shit is insane. Why would you put fishing lures in your mouth? Why? WHY????! I can only conclude that there are numerous people who have just got the concept of fishing completely ass backwards in the most pathetic and tragic way possible.
One of the specialties of the museum is abnormal births, and there is an entire wall dedicated to portraits and biographies of Siamese twins, jars of conjoined fetuses, and in one central isolated case, the embalmed body of conjoined brothers who lived into old age, acquiring separate farms, and wives, and lives that they took turns living weekly.
The museum may seem grotesque, exploitative, morbid, deranged. But the subjects are preserved lovingly, displayed with respect and deference, and painstakingly cared for.
While it’s true that I was fascinated by some, and repelled by others, and while it’s clear that the point of the museum is to cater to that slightly unhinged, gruesome obsession we have cultivated with the alien and the dead, there’s something to be said for how humbling it feels to stand in front of the skeleton of a ten foot tall woman, and wonder what your life would be like if you were defined by an aberration so extreme you could never hope for an interaction that was not somehow colored by it.
And there’s something to be said for the kind of miraculous transformation that can bring us face to face with the freaks and the feared, the sideshow mutants and the tragic remains of lives lived in pain, and somehow endow the encounter with dignity and intimacy, and leave us with the suspicion that just beyond some numinous boundary, the things we deny are reverently illuminated and monstrously sacred with the strangest beauty.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

It’s been a long few months. As much as I am enjoying graduate school, I have to admit that being obliged to prioritize all my activities has really forced me to acknowledge just how much I enjoy drinking. Boy oh Boy. Then again, people talk a lot about the benefits of recognizing and being mindful of your coping mechanisms, and since I don’t have health insurance I’m pretty positive that even if I really stepped it up and starting drinking at ten in the morning it would still be cheaper than therapy. Probably. Even assuming I only have about ten or fifteen therapy sessions a week, I would still come out on top. And this way, I can have therapy any time. WHO COULD JUDGE ME FOR THAT?!
I currently require more medicinal alcohol than usual, given the time of year and the uproarious run of luck I’ve been having lately. Some people get really excited for sweater weather. I get really apprehensive about spider weather. The Pacific Northwest is home to some incredible fauna, such as conifers, seasonal depression, and arachnids. Given the concatenation of various factors of my life, such as the fact that my house is a moribund wreck on par with Miss Havisham, the fact that there is obviously a curse on me, and the clemency of breeding conditions for ghastly pestiferous eight legged fiends, this has been a banner year for horrifying shit occupying my house. Even allowing that every year yields a prodigious crop of things that I completely fucking hate, this year has been particularly fruitful thanks to the nest of bragilions of what appear to be actual BLACK WIDOW SPIDERS LIVING IN MY DRYER. Although this is statistically unlikely, it is also not improbable given that my life is generally punctuated by the type of bad luck that is both contingently remote and generally inexplicable.
The consequences of this pyrrhic discovery are diverse. I live in fear, I am applying for a permit to carry a bazooka, and laundry is hella old school. Until an exterminator comes, our house is covered in layers of undergarments I washed in the bathroom sink. As usual, the environment around me is undergoing the inexorable transformation into that of a whorehouse.
As a more relevant repercussion, however, I have become excruciatingly aware of the inadequacy of my health insurance. Granted, a perfect plan for me would cover burns, inadvertent poisonings, spider bites, ethanol IVs, ancient curses, things I accidentally swallowed, motorcycle crashes and dysentery, which I hear from my HR representative is unlikely. But health care, and what constitutes adequate insurance for health care, are hot topics in the current landscape of U.S. legislation.
The general underlying premise of health insurance in various nations is predicated on what, in terms of U.S. constitutional law, is considered a right. Certain nations consider health insurance to be an unalienable right, whereas some philosophies regard it as a privilege. Regardless of your own personal opinions on the subject, it’s pretty clear that these diverse ideologies give rise to equally diverse systems of care.
Chinese medicine is more of a holistic process than the mostly reactive, specialized event type of care common in the US. Some aspects of Chinese medicine are completely accessible, intelligible, and evidently effective. Some are alarming, confusing, and inexplicable. And some processes are simply ineffable. A lot of the obstacles Western individuals encounter when attempting to parse Chinese medicine are direct results of ideological conflicts between Eastern and Western philosophies.
Health care in the United States is primarily evidence based, responsive, sterile, and specific. We manifest a constellation of symptoms, we remark those symptoms, we submit them to an accredited expert, and that expert in turn analyzes those symptoms and pronounces a diagnosis, which then informs a prescribed course of treatment predominantly contingent on the disease rather than the individual. Western medicine applies a highly specified and specialized approach to illness; conditions belong to specific parts of the individual’s body, and have distinct definitions and parameters.
The Chinese approach to medicine is entirely different; the individual is viewed as a system, each aspect is interrelated and dependent on the others. We as westerners have some difficulty envisioning the concept of a life force, a motive, fluid, dynamic and animate power within the body and the mind that flows both perceptibly and inexorably.
Also, putting a snake in a bottle and covering it with booze is not necessarily consonant with my idea of tylenol.
My field being medical ethics, and having a personal investment in the scientific method, there was pretty much no way I could visit a country with such a markedly different epistemology without participating in some hands on research. The following activities are things we engaged in in the interest of exploring alternative ideologies.
(Note: As the Principle Investigator, I was able to outsource some of the more tedious data collection, and focus on diligently documenting the procedures and adhering to the protocol. Being a PI means that you don’t have to do any boring shit like math or work. You get a graduate student to do that kind of BS.)
This treatment requires that fire is used to suck the air out of a glass globe, which is then immediately affixed to your skin by way of advanced super heated vacuum technology. Ever cleaning the globe is unacceptable.
EEEEEEEEEK. Tedious Data Collection like being IMMOLATED.
Bamboo cups are added to make you look less like a pokemon. The difference between the two vessels, and the rationale for the disparate application, was not explained to me in a way that I could comprehend. This could be because it doesn’t make any sense, or because my Chinese is so overwhelmingly Bu Hao.
The final product, is, however, inspiring.

It’s a miracle! He’s cured!

Hallelujah!

It is, of course, possible to visit modern hospitals in China. The Matilda hospital in Hong Kong is considered one of the most superlative and progressive research and treatment facilities in the world. However, in addition to massage, cupping and liquor distilled from the types of organisms generally associated with nightmares (perhaps they would like a tour of my basement?), ancient Chinese medicine is a discipline practiced widely and successfully.
My experience with Chinese medicine had heretofore been exposure to repellent substances that are alleged to improve virility. There is traboccant evidence to prove that the worse a thing is, the better it will be for your manhood. Rat juice? Horse Anus? Essence of Cloaca? These are not Ozzy Osbourne solo projects. These are treatments. It might also be germane to note here that every other experience I have had with Chinese medicine has been the procedure where a person repeatedly strikes your wrist with their eyes closed and then tells you that you’re fat. This should be experienced annually.
So imagine my excitement when our friend Shao Shao offered us the opportunity to consult with a traditional Chinese Medical Doctor in his home clinic. I don’t know what you picture when you hear the term “home clinic” (For me, it’s reminiscent of the bathroom cut scenes in Silent Hill, but you may have had a better childhood), but the reality in this case comprehended a single room with a corroded floor, flyblown mirror, and a peeling decal of a long washed up Chinese pop star on the wall. At least it wasn’t a home surgical suite.
The room was about 20 square feet, and was crowded and damp. In addition to myself, my brother, Shao Shao and the doctor, the room contained a camp bed in déshabillé, a rusted rotary fan, two ancient computers, and several posters of the human body of the type usually seen on the wall at budget massage parlors. (as an aside, unlike Vietnam, massage parlors in China are not generally used as euphemistic fronts for whorehouses. Those are hair salons, as Chinese humor is geared towards the growing body of 12 year olds that think a double entendre involving the word “head” is hilarious.) Drying lines of faded clothes and greying underwear were roped across the ceiling.
The doctor himself was wearing an outfit that presumably conformed to the standard professional uniform. A hastily donned frayed white shirt, paired with worn professional grade underpants. “BAD BOY!” proclaim the ragged boxers. “USA!”
After the introductions, the exam began. Fred admitted to feeling tired and stressed out. The doctor asked about his diet, his exercise, his love life. He prodded Fred in various places, and listened to his chest.

Towards the end of the exam, the doctor repeatedly tapped Fred’s wrist and then informed him that he was fat. Thank God, because I was beginning to feel a little self conscious and uncomfortable. “Should I say something?” I thought. “I’m certain this man is really breaching the standard of care by omitting this procedure.” We were looking at a serious malpractice suit here. What a relief!
Ultimately, the doctor gave Fred a plastic pouch of his personal formula of all purpose panacea, which he kept in a grungy plastic bag underneath his camp bed.
The storage instructions in Chinese translate roughly to: “Keep in a gross dark place. Film with grime. Refrigerate after opening.”

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

He also wrote Fred a prescription for another demulcent, which could be filled at any pharmacy.
The efficacy of this treatment is currently under evaluation.
In many ways, I enjoyed my experiences with Medical treatment in China far more than I have in the states. I find a lot of comfort in massage. I feel like western medicine has a lot to learn from acupuncturists. I firmly believe that the US could benefit from the Chinese practice of providing pedicures with 90 minute foot rubs for less than twenty dollars. But more than anything, I really enjoyed the novelty of being treated as more than the sum of my parts.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Inner Mongolia is barren as hell. Spindly cows stagger across the dehydrated plains. Mesas loom grimly above a parched landscape, acarpous and scorched. Rugged mosquitoes with slouchy porkpies and rank cigars roughly assault your sunburned skin. Water costs more than beer.
We trekked across the flatlands to join an academic conference in Xilinhot attended by several of Fred's classmates. Xilinhot is famous for giving a shit about Genghis Khan, by which I mean that Xilinhot is pretty much the cultural equivalent of the bar attached to a Super 8 motel somewhere in North Dakota on a Tuesday night. They have a cultural history museum, the top floor of which is dedicated to paper mache reproductions of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. They have a national gynecology hospital, flamboyant, evocative and nauseating in festive pinks and purples. What they do not have is a hotel willing to board foreigners or a restaurant that doesn't evoke the subconscious self loathing of a first date at a bowling alley.
Fred and I dragged our bags in and out of several reeking taxis, trudging from hotel to hotel. One woman screamed when she saw us. Another one called the police.
This turned out to be awesome, since the police decided it was part of their civic duty to find us a hotel. They placed us in the back of their police car and drove us down the seediest, most pathetic street that ever wended its useless way to a hole that would rent a room to white people.

civil servants.

The hotel was hidden behind a high facade, festooned with topless men lounging gracelessly on the grimy bricks, T shirts tied around their slick foreheads, beer bottles sweating rivulets in the merciless heat. Women dangled ugly babies and stared vacantly as the police cruiser scraped its way up the uneven drive. At night, a motley and swashbuckling pride of indolent taxi drivers lurked around the hood of an idling Buick, smoking harsh cigarettes and squinting into the broken street.
One of the benefits of finding yourself in an area with limited tourist appeal is that there are fewer aggressive individuals with insinuating smiles that are willing to take you to see something for a "cheap price." One of the drawbacks is that there are still plenty of people willing to take you to see nothing for a whole lot.
So when a jovial, portly, middle aged cab driver offered to give us a tour of the terrain surrounding the city, including the places his parents took him as a child, we were mildly skeptical. "We don't get many foreign visitors here!" He exclaimed, rubbing his shiny forehead with an honest to god handkerchief. "I think it is our duty as citizens to show our visitors our country." Fred was for it because inner Mongolia is as boring as watching a cow starve. I agreed because my intuition is more likely to endorse an individual if he looks like Mr. Pickwick, regardless of ethnicity. D. agreed to come back for us after lunch, and told us he would charge us about 15 US dollars.
The first leg of the drive was beautiful, in a barren sort of way. D drove along the back roads so we could watch lanky, ochre colored boys drive spindly, wild horses across the plains.

The parched ground was cracked, and nearly smoking in the noon sun. D. drove slowly, stopping every time I pointed my camera out the window. With the day at its hottest, we pulled the cab into an uneven gravel lot overlooking a wide swath of grassland. We ducked under the blistering arm of a wrought iron gate and hiked up the asphalt path until it ended. The plane was endless, and the rocky outcrops broke the smooth face irregularly, providing slivers of inadequate shade, jutting incongruously and impotently out of the landscape. Below us, blinding in the direct light of the summer sun, stretched the reservoir, the surface glassy and brilliant, crystalline and inviting.

D. led us down a rocky path to the edge of the water, until the stones gave way to a thick, silky mud that coated our feet and left silicate grit between our toes. The water was extraordinary - cool and still, with silvery fish appearing and disappearing rapidly around our ankles. D. waded in up to his waist, and grinned at us. "I never learned to swim," he explained sheepishly. "This is the only water around."
Climbing back onto the rocky shore, we were greeted by a horde of obnoxious teenagers with cell phone cameras taking our picture. "Lao Wai!" They informed each other, pointing. "Lao Wai!" We affirmed. It was like first contact without the spaceship. I encourage you to go to China with a horde of other white people, and simply repeat everything that people say while they take your picture. If you really want to have some fun,
"dai4 wo3 qu4 kan4 ni3de ling2dao3"
means "Take me to your leader," and I suggest that you throw that in once or twice, just to up the ante a little. Trust me. It will be hilarious.
Tourism in China is essentially a carnival of shit that is ridiculously old, where you are hustled from one busted thing to the next and people attempt to sell you absurdly overpriced shirts that depict the busted thing you just saw. For years, tourists have gone to China and paid money to look at old busted shit, which is why, when you go to China, people are really enthusiastic about charging you money to see shit that is old and busted. China is really capitalizing on the two pronged theory that 1) things that are "Ancient and Beautiful" are attractive to populations who continually recycle styles from 20 years ago like there is ANY amount of time that might make stirrup pants acceptable again, and 2) that those same populations with the fashion memories of goldfish are by extension unable to distinguish between a pile of rubble from a defunct noodle stand and some palatial ruins from the Ming dynasty. And who can blame them. We are the assholes acting like jeggings are reasonable. Just be thankful that the T-shirt you bought says you saw the great wall, even if it was "Ping’s discount hovel of pajamas." You know in your heart that it doesn't matter to you.

a tribute to a nobler age.

Acting on the principle that the central tenet of Chinese tourism is "have built it several thousand years ago and they will come," China designs much of their new construction to look like old construction. Our guide led us back to the car, now nearly molten in the heat of the late afternoon, and suggested that he drive us a little out of our way to see the main attraction in the area: a fifteen foot tall replica of Genghis khan's head, molded in plastic and finished to look like ancient stone work; set imposingly on a hill above the largest highway in Xilinhot.
We hesitated. We were in the middle of nowhere, with little money, in sandals and swimsuits, with no other viable mode of transport, no one to call, and no reasonable alternatives. We looked at each other. We shrugged. We agreed reluctantly, and got in the car. We pulled out of the gravel lot, and rejoined the long dark highway snaking across the grasslands. five or ten minutes passed before we again pulled off the highway. D. shut off the engine. "Just a moment," he said to us.

If you are now, like we were then, reading this post waiting for the moment that our seemingly philanthropic guide dropped his mask and stood revealed to us in his true colors, you need to read no further. It was at this juncture that this man's character was exposed in all of its nakedness, burning like a brand in the vast expanse of the dry plains. He left the driver's seat, and moved around to the truck of the car. As soon as he was out of the car, I turned to Fred. "What is going on?!" I asked. We had no idea. Was this the moment he would demand additional payment for his unsolicited tour? Were we going to have to battle it out along the side of a desolate highway in the middle of god knows where in inappropriate walking shoes and damp clothing? Did he realize how threatening the eternal, unbroken plains appeared in the context of our potential disagreement? Would he abandon us? Rob us? Sell us? Would the bland, calcified fields surrounding us soon house the drying HUSKS OF OUR DESICCATED CORPSES? WOULD I BE MUMMIFIED IN FRIGGING MONGOLIA OVER A FIFTEEN DOLLAR TRIP TO VIEW AN ENORMOUS PLASTIC REPRODUCTION OF GHENGIS KHAN'S FAKE HEAD?
We waited anxiously, listening to the thumps and rustles coming from behind us as D. rummaged through the trunk of the cab. For shovels? Shackles? Firearms? Worse?
The sun was getting lower as D. opened the door and clambered back into the driver's seat, clutching a large sack. His ruddy face was filmed with sweat, and creased into a habitual congenial grin. Under the circumstances, his good natured smile seemed sinister, lochetic, foreboding. Nodding briefly and apologetically to me, he turned to Fred and spoke rapidly in Chinese.
Beaming, he produced two large water bottles from the bag, slick with glistening condensation, kept cold in a cooler in the trunk. Fred translated. "He thought we might be hungry, and he saw on a television special once that white people like to eat bread, so he went to the store. He wasn't sure what kind of bread white people like, though, so he bought us a couple kinds. He said they were out of coca cola, and they only had pepsi, so he got us water. He hopes that's ok. He knows Americans really like coca cola."
Although in a sense anti-climactic, the soft yellow loaf filled with dates and jam was delicious, the water welcome to throats as parched as the steppe. Our guide drove faster through the growing twilight, explaining that if we could mount the next hill quickly, we could watch the sun set over the bright silver rivers leading into the reservoir.
At the summit, we pulled the cab off into the bushes and turned to watch the deepening crimson rays glance brilliantly from the surface of the winding tributaries, and transform the dales into pools of gold and shadow. In the last dying light, a collapsing cottage caught the final beams and blazed into an unexpected beauty, radiant in its liquefaction, in the syrupy golden of the thickening dusk. Never had some old busted shit seemed so compelling in its desuetude; the steppe looked so homogenous in the broad day, but the growing penumbra highlighted the hills and dips. The light on the uneven plain fell in viscous chunks, collecting in dales and running slowly down the hillsides.

Then we turned our steps towards the head of Genghis Khan.
As it turns out, the head is better positioned to view from a distance than it is placed for tenable approach. In our plastic sandals, we climbed over barbed wire fences and the ruins of old cattle pens. Nettles brushed our legs, huge crickets exploded from the brush up into our faces, whirring and clicking like mechanized irritants. Outlined in the dusk, the silhouette was a prepossessing figure from the road. Up close, it was clear even in the advancing night that the paint was flaking, the plastic scraped and worn.
Bushwhacking our way back to the car in the dark, our guide remarked, “maybe we weren’t supposed to climb these fences.”
The freeway was dark, indistinguishable from the rest of our surroundings. No lamps lit the roadway, and there were few cars or trucks shining their headlamps through the summer night. We drove through the night in silence, occasionally irradiated by the headlamps of oncoming cars. Our guide’s face was thoughtful. The steppe was crossed with shadows in the moonlight.
When he broke the silence, his voice was hesitant, and quiet. Music was an important part of Mongolian culture and communication, he told us. Since we had asked so many questions about inner Mongolia, and about the people, he wondered if we would like to hear some traditional Mongolian songs?
We would.
His voice was surprisingly beautiful, pitched high and clear, with a deep expression and wide range. In the deepening night, with the dim luminance of the moon and the dashboard lights, the sound was mesmeric, soothing, compelling.
In the silence after the song, I felt the rising melancholy of homesickness, coupled with the strange sensation of being precisely where I belonged.
As we re-entered the city, D. received a phone call from his wife. He spoke with her for a few minutes, and then asked us if we had enough time to see some famous temples in the city. His wife had admonished him. “Who wants to see a hole filled with water? You should have taken them to the monastery!” As you may have divined, the temples had all been destroyed during the cultural revolution, but had been rebuilt to the exact specifications of a new thing that looks just as busted as it would look were it actually to have decayed over millennia.
His entire family was waiting there to welcome us.
D. looked anxiously over his glasses at us. His son, who had inherited the squat frame of his father, was uninterested in school. His grades were not good, and he insisted he wanted to be a famous basketball player. Maybe we could talk to him? If he were to meet some foreigners, perhaps he would become more interested in learning English?
His wife escorted us all over the temple. The night was clear and warm, and the public square was crowded with people. We posed for several pictures with the family, and talked with the son, and coaxed the daughter, who was terrified of us.
As it grew later, the family drove us home in the cab. They refused to accept any payment beyond the fifteen dollars we had paid earlier in the day, which would barely cover our host’s rent to the cab company, let alone the gas. “Maybe someday,” D. said wistfully, “If I can ever visit America, someone will show me their city, too.”
I thought,
Good luck, pal.
It beggars belief that out there in the world there are more than a scant handful of people who would, with a family to feed, abdicate an entire afternoon of income to spend eight hours showing two strangers the sentimental landmarks of their dreamy childhood; who would turn a stale, contrived burlesque of a temple into a warm, joyful family outing; who would volunteer the depth and breadth of their memories, experiences and tradition in the service of promoting education and understanding; who would modify their curiosity with a superhuman exertion of tact; who would, in light of a broken radio, sing the haunting lullabies of their babyhood in the weak light of an aging cab, a single speeding pool of light on a long, dark, unbroken road.
And please recall that he was out of pocket for several kinds of bread.
So if you ever come across this gentleman, out there in the world, marshal whatever forces you have at your disposal to conquer any baseness or selfishness or impatience in your nature. Set aside your daily concerns, defer some pressing obligations, and spend one afternoon treating a stranger to a personal guided tour of a place you grew up loving. Do it for me. Do it for Karma. Do it in the spirit of building international relations. Or just do it because nothing can approach the experience of encountering, in a howling wilderness, the lesson that ordinary people can have the extraordinary effect of becoming the kindest person you have ever met.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

It’s been a busy few months! Graduate school almost destroyed me, this site got a new look, I had to create a list of people who should probably be investigated for my murder if I die, and Mike and I took a trip to the American Southwest.

As an ethicist, I have some opinions about some of Arizona’srecentlegislation. As a tourist, I have some opinions about some of Arizona’s retirement communities.

However, exposure to Surprise, AZ has given me a remarkable business idea. I present to you a specialized line of scented candles and room fresheners called “Lifestyles.” You can choose from such premier and inspired scents as:

“Michigan Militia,” which smells like a small log cabin inhabited by a single large man who never bathes, with a bass note of congealed remains of condensed canned beef stew, and a top note of gun cleaning oil. Hints of pine and dead raccoon.

“Graduate Student,” which smells like something starchy that has been overcooked, two week old chocolate chip cookies that are parsimoniously nibbled to make them last longer, a base note of print toner, a top note of wet wool, and a dominant note of cigarettes that cost eight dollars a pack. Hints of wellbutrin and single-minded, frenetic desperation.

“Old White Republican,” a base note of the gravel that replaced your lawn coupled with that weird metallic smell you get on your hands when you sweat all over money. Hints of citrus. Candle includes special light activated sound of your community gate slamming shut on the heels of the minority you hired to do your landscaping. (The race and ethnicity of the minority does not matter to you.)

“Spiritual Healing Clinic,”evocative of a vortex, which will not ever be explained to your satisfaction, this candle combines the scent of expensive body wash with the earthy smell of sun dried sagebrush. Or it would, if the whole candle were not completely deodorized by a sterile atomizer. Please have a seat on our faux cowhide sofa. The “doctor” will be with you shortly.

However, not everything in Arizona is a retirement community. (This is totally why people have blogs – to disseminate vital information that people may otherwise not be aware of!) While Arizona may be a terrible place for a lung transplant, it is an incredible place to go if you want to be menaced by a landscape. Arizona is an alien place, with bulbous and harmful plant life rearing its spiny arms at every turn.

hug me.

Once outside the confines of the cities, the careful cultivation of citrus trees ends and the scrub lands begin, stretching eternally and acarpously to a dehydrated horizon. Elephantine piles of dead rufescent rock tower over the desert. Sharp tracks of javelina pigs cut into the crusty clay in aimless paths.

Sedona is in the southernmost region of the area known as the painted desert. It is called the painted desert because you are not allowed to just write “HOLY SHIT” on a map.

The town of Sedona is home to a bunch of stores that sell the kind of exercise clothes you are not allowed to sweat in, dozens of artist’s collectives populated by people who used to be lawyers, heavily botoxed women promulgating the benefits of naturopathy, and people who give guided tours of parking lots to other people that believe in UFOs.

The hiking is pretty amazing; once you leave the confines of the town, you can park and head out on any of the innumerable trails that lead off into the rusty oblivion.

We took the trail that wraps around Bell rock, a site famed for having vibrations that may cause you to pay some money. As far as we could tell from the limited conversations we had with breathless new age crystal enthusiasts with platinum highlights and velour tracksuits, it’s like some nystagmus of the aura of a rock, or something.

Whether or not this area is imbued with some supernatural power, or whether they have simply shot so many people that the canyon will echo the report for a thousand years, it was a supremely beautiful place for a walk, and like nothing I have ever seen.

SPECIAL FOR YOU TODAY MY FRIEND!!!

It has been such a long time since I updated, I feel like I owe you some additional bonus information. And although there is something perverse in offering the following as an apology, since I almost feel like I should be apologizing for it, I can’t resist sharing a little about the visitors to this blog.

Most blogging services give you the opportunity to monitor the number of visits, the length of visits, and the routes people took to find you. I have spent a long time studying the keywords that people type in to get to this blog, and the take home point is really that I am entirely baffled about how the internet works. So as a conciliatory gesture, I present to you some of the search terms that ultimately direct people here.